Archive for the ‘Science Fiction and Space Shit’ Category
Thursday, September 7th, 2006
Recently some joker spread a phony story on the internet about how Kurt Russell had tricked Paramount into greenlighting ESCAPE FROM EARTH, a third Snake Plissken movie, as part of a three picture deal. I knew it was too good to be true, but I also know that Russell always says Snake is his favorite character he’s ever played, and he clearly loves working with John Carpenter. Carpenter could use a return to the big screen, and I wouldn’t be surprised if after Tarantino’s DEATH PROOF comes out next year (starring Kurt Russell as a killer stuntman and scored by Carpenter) there is a rise in popularity and nostalgia for the classic Kurt Russell badass roles. I think it would actually be smart to make a new Plissken movie right now as long as it wasn’t a huge budget and it wasn’t a rehash of the other two. So, their loss I guess. And the world’s.
Of course, reading this horse shit got ME nostalgic for the old John Carpenter badass movies, so I watched THEY LIVE again, because that’s my favorite (sorry Kurt). And then I did something I never did before, I watched ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and ESCAPE FROM L.A. in a row, to get a better comparison. It’s sort of like one of those puzzles where there’s two similar drawings and you have to pick out what’s different. Hey, wait a minute, that baseball player is holding an ear of corn instead of a bat and shit like that. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a doctor’s office, but they have Highlights there sometimes. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: John Carpenter, Kurt Russell
Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 30 Comments »
Wednesday, September 6th, 2006
After watching PREDATOR for the first time since the ’80s and realizing that it’s actually a good movie, I decided to watch PREDATOR 2. I never seen this one before and I knew the reputation wasn’t too good. More ominous, instead of John McDIEHARDTiernan the director is Stephen LOST IN SPACE Hopkins. Not lookin good.
But damn if the opening isn’t a scorcher. It starts out with the familiar Predator POV heat vision in the jungle… but as it pans across you realize it’s not the jungle – it’s the outskirts of Los Angeles. THE URBAN JUNGLE! In the futuristic year of 1997. (Think about it: a Predator is loose in Los Angeles at the same time Snake Plissken is looking for the president in New York. Meanwhile, the Spice Girls are topping the charts and TITANIC is breaking box office records.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Danny Glover, Gary Busey, Predator series, Stephen Hopkins
Posted in Action, Horror, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit, Thriller | 12 Comments »
Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006
THEY LIVE is one of my favorite movies ever. It is probaly the very best version of a rare type of movie I love: the badass action movie that also works as a political statement. BILLY JACK may be more political, but it seems so self important and it has no sense of humor. THEY LIVE is kind of saying the same thing THE MATRIX is saying about a society brainwashed by media and advertising, but it’s saying more than that. It’s about the America of the Reagan years, when everything was geared to help the rich at the expense of the working class. Which for some reason seems awfully familiar today. Huh. Weird.
“Rowdy” Roddy Piper plays Nada, a drifter who walks into town with tools and a sleeping bag on his back. (Hey, what happens to that sleeping bag? I think it disappears.) This is a hero who not only doesn’t drive a sports car, but doesn’t have a car at all. Or a house. Or a job, at first. The plants are closing, the jobs are drying up, that’s why he’s on the move. But he happens to get a construction job, where he meets Frank (Keith motherfuckin David from THE THING) and finds out about a homeless encampment near a church where some nice people serve food for the homeless. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: John Carpenter, Keith David, Roddy Piper
Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 14 Comments »
Saturday, August 19th, 2006
PREDATOR starts out with a shot of an alien spacecraft jettisoning a shuttle towards earth. We just see it from the distance, there’s not alot of detail visible, but we don’t live under a rock, so we know what’s going on here. The extra-terrestrial hunting enthusiast known only as “Predator” is arriving on Earth. The human characters in the movie get all the screen time, but Predator gets the first shot, so we know this is really his story.
Like E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL, PREDATOR doesn’t give us any backstory on the alien star. All we know is the guy is no botanist. Maybe an exotic meat salesman. It almost seems like an alien remake of FIRST BLOOD because you got this one crazy alien maniac out in the jungle by himself, taking on a couple platoons worth of elite soldiers and doing a pretty good job of it. John Rambo did some sick shit but he didn’t skin a bunch of guys and hang them upside down from the trees. He didn’t pull out people’s spines. So Predator’s got one on John. You even get the scene where Predator, like John, is wounded and has to do some makeshift surgery on himself. The only difference is he uses advanced alien technology to heal himself instead of just crudely sewing himself up. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bill Duke, Carl Weathers, Jesse Ventura, John McTiernan, Predator series, Sonny Landham, Val Verde
Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 16 Comments »
Tuesday, August 1st, 2006
I COME IN PEACE aka DARK ANGEL
Craig R. Baxley’s second directorial work (after ACTION JACKSON, before STONE COLD) is probaly his weirdest. It’s kind of like the cop movie version of BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET. Dolph Lundgren plays a plays-by-his-own-rules cop whose partner dies in a drug sting that happens to also be interrupted by an alien invader with a trenchcoat and glowing eyes. This guy, I don’t know what his name is but he’s not a lovable E.T. type alien, he’s just a tall scary dude who goes around and says “I come in peace” but then shoots a weird tube out of his palm into your head and sucks out your endorphins. I could’ve sworn he stole the heroin from the drug dealers, but the reason he’s on earth really is not to steal heroin, it’s just to farm people for endorphins. We learn later from an outer space cop who’s chasing this guy that endorphins are a valuable drug on whatever planet they’re from, I guess we’ll call it Planet Icomeinpeace. He must be stopped because if he goes back to Icomeinpeace and gets alot of alien space dollars for his endorphins (or “dorph” as I bet they call it on the space streets) then other aliens are gonna figure out how easy it is to cop dorph out of our heads and it’ll be over for the human race. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brian Benben, Christmas, Craig R. Baxley, Dolph Lundgren, Mathias Hues
Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 6 Comments »
Sunday, June 18th, 2006
Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with our main man, Vern, who got an early look at Richard Linklater’s newest, A SCANNER DARKLY. My words are meaningless when the great Vern speaketh below. Enjoy!
A SCANNER DARKLY, Richard (BAD NEWS BEARS) Linklater’s new adaptation of the Philip K. Dick novel, is a visionary and boldly stylized look at the tragedies of the drug culture and the growing police state. Its psychedelic style of wobbly, traced-over animation creates a fluid, disconnected reality that perfectly captures–
Ah fuck, who am I fooling. This movie put me to fuckin sleep.
Maybe it’s over my head, I won’t rule that out. And I don’t want to say it’s necessarily a terrible movie (like WAKING LIFE – I hate that god damn movie). I haven’t read the book, and maybe people who did will enjoy it. Who knows. I think I admire what the movie is going for but that doesn’t change the fact that, to me anyway, it’s a meandering bore with barely any characters, humor or even plot to latch onto. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Philip K. Dick, Richard Linklater
Posted in AICN, Cartoons and Shit, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 12th, 2006
SPOILER ALERT !!
Hey folks, Harry here… I feel it’s my duty to bring this Vern review – as I was amongst the first to herald the genius of Paul Verhoeven’s HOLLOW MAN… sadly the version I saw well in advance of the release of that film is not the film that everyone else saw. I still like the one that was released, but no where near the longer edit which I feel was far far better. Well here’s Vern with a look at the much needed sequel! Here ya go…
Boys–
Like most DTV sequels, the title HOLLOW MAN II immediately brings up a question: who the fuck are they making HOLLOW MAN II for?
Well in this particular case, I am gonna have to step forward. I am the guilty party. They are clearly making this movie for me, and I can prove it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Christian Slater, DTV, DTV sequels
Posted in Action, AICN, Horror, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit, Thriller | 4 Comments »
Sunday, April 2nd, 2006
There are three very clever sequences in this movie. First, it opens with narration over a starfield, and then pans over to show Mars. Suddenly the familiar UNIVERSAL logo letters spin around Mars. So it’s just like the usual studio logo except the red planet instead of the globe. Then the letters go off screen and the camera zooms into Mars and into a space colony where the movie takes place. It’s like there’s not even time to bother with a studio logo, our only option is to work it into the plot. That is how urgent it is to get to the motherfucking DOOM.
Yeah yeah, I know my movie history, so you don’t have to flood me with emails pointing out that the great visionary McG already connected the first shot of C’S As 1 to whichever studio logo it was. But this is a different thing because the movie has already started, and then we get the logo within the movie. If we are to follow our understanding of standard cinematical language, there may really be giant letters orbiting around Mars within the reality of DOOM. It all takes place indoors, so there’s no way to know if there are giant UNIVERSAL shaped shadows dripping across the landscape. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andrzej Bartkowiak, first person POV, Karl Urban, The Rock
Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit, Videogame | 6 Comments »
Friday, March 31st, 2006
Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with our main man Vern who has seen SLITHER and wants to tell you about it. Give him your ear… uh… I mean, give him your eye. Enjoy!
Boyos–
I guess horror movies are like anything else, they go in cycles. We’ve had this whole drought where it seemed like there was nothing but sissy PG-13 studio horror, and lots of horror fans whining. Now the harsher R-rated horror movies are starting to trickle back in, and a whole other set of people get their chance to whine. (It turns out that our society is just now going down the shitter because there’s a movie where mutant cannibals are mean to a baby. Even though it’s a remake of a 30 year old movie about mutant cannibals being mean to a baby.) Anyway, now with SLITHER we get back another old buddy we haven’t seen in so long we almost forgot about him: the funny horror movie. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Darren Shahlavi, Elizabeth Banks, Gregg Henry, James Gunn, Michael Rooker, Nathan Fillion
Posted in AICN, Comedy/Laffs, Horror, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 3 Comments »
Saturday, October 1st, 2005
It’s all Laremy [name removed to protect the innocent*]’s fault. I know, sounds like a made up name, but this is apparently a real guy, a fellow Seattle movie reviewer who emails me all the time. As you know I am one of them lone wolfs they got, so I don’t want any part of no critical community or nothin. So I’ve made kind of a sport of dodging this guy’s kind offers to go to critic’s screenings with him. He sees alot of the same movies I do, but weeks early and for free. So I really oughta go but I told him look bud, I like to see the movies with my man Joe Public. (Joe Public actually is a made up name, it is symbolic of regular individuals such as you or I and not critics. Just to be clear. I think you knew that though sorry)
Anyway, Laremy gives me a heads up on alot of these, and he has a pretty good track record. He told me about 40 Year Old Virgin, he warned me that Lord of War was not as good as hoped, and a couple other ones. So I took him seriously when he said “SERENITY will be HUGE. Nice flick, nice laughs, nice action, well done all the way around. Summer Glau is highly doable as well.” When I asked him if that was that one space ship movie he got a little more thoughtful and warned not to get too excited because “it’s better with no expectations, like peyote.” (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adam Baldwin, based on a TV show, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Joss Whedon, the Nerdening of America
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 197 Comments »
